Book Review: Scrum Insights for Practitioners by Hiren Doshi

The Scrum framework as described in Scrum Guide (available for free at ScrumGuides.org) by its creators Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland is apparently simple, lightweight and minimally prescriptive in terms of rules, people roles and artifacts.
It is rather easy to understand it conceptually.
But applying this framework in real life product development situations is entirely a different ball game.

Because of its minimally prescriptive nature, Scrum usually gets misinterpreted and wrongly implemented by product development teams who solely rely on what they have read in Scrum Guide.
Such implementation of Scrum does not usually yield the desired benefits and sometimes even proves disastrous.

While the teams can always put sincere efforts and learn on their own from their mistakes, the learning curve is rather steep.
Not all product development teams can afford this luxury to learn on their own due to time-to-market pressure in a competitive world.
Coaching will address this problem to a great extent.
But good Scrum coaches may not be easily available in the market at one’s beck and call.
And there may be budgetary constraints that prevent an organization them from engaging a good coach.
In such situations the best thing is to learn from books written by experienced Scrum coaches. Scrum Insights for Practitioners by Hiren Doshi is one such book.

Doshi has written this book to help the practitioners master the Scrum framework by sharing in-depth practical insights drawn from his long and extensive experience as a Scrum coach.

The book provides very pragmatic interpretation of all the topics dealt in Scrum Guide – Scrum Theory, Definition of Scrum, Scrum Values, Scrum Team, Scrum Events, Scrum Artifacts, Artifact Transparency, Definition “Done”.
The author has ensured that his interpretation remains true to the Scrum values and principles.
The book also goes beyond the Scrum Guide to discuss Self-Organization and to clarify myths, misconceptions and mysteries of Scrum. A case study on Scrum-based product development is also presented in the end.

Written in a simple conversational style this short handy book is perhaps the first book on Scrum that newbies should read after going through the official Scrum Guide.